Veil

by Aaron Overfield

  He immediately spotted the setup on the far left-hand side of hospital’s 13th floor, about halfway between the back and where he was standing. Even if he took every bit of equipment that was used to make up Tsay’s lab and piled it all together, he doubted it would take up a twentieth of the entire floor. Damn, that was a lot of wasted space. He again wondered what the original intent was for that 13th floor.

  After he propped open the door, he went back to the target’s body. It wasn’t as clean a shot as he would’ve liked, but it did the job. He didn’t consider himself a perfectionist, but he did like things to go a certain way; he liked things to go as planned. Some things you couldn’t prepare for, so you simply had to improvise or accept the outcome.

  The most he would’ve reasonably expected was for the doctor to reflexively put his hand up over his face as a futile attempt at blocking. It was the body’s natural response and he saw it happen dozens of times. The body itself didn’t know what was coming at it was a bullet; it simply knew “block.” The most he would’ve reasonably expected was a defensive wound through the doctor’s hand. A hand that, of course, would’ve been completely unable to stop a bullet.

  However, when the target’s right hand, which supported him after his fall, started to slip out from under him, he instinctually moved to brace and lift himself with his other hand, which was still latched onto the handle of his briefcase. As he shifted his weight onto the briefcase, it slid against the polished concrete and out from under him. The whole thing was a set of quick, insignificant movements, but it still managed to send the target’s head backwards and tilted up his chin. Such insignificant movement, but it threw the target’s head back just enough.

  The bullet he intended to send straight into the target’s forehead instead entered the target at a sharp angle at the top of the eye-socket near the bridge of his nose. Rather than exiting directly through the back of his head, the bullet instead exited at an angle through the top. All that before the target’s briefcase even flattened on the ground beside him, with his hand still clutched onto the handle. Not at all the clean shot he hoped for but still a shot, nonetheless. It was enough for him to consider at least that part of the job done.

  He stepped over the target’s body to retrieve the plastic sheeting he placed next to the elevator. He spread half of the plastic on one side of the target and left the other half bunched-up against the body. He rolled the target onto the spread-out section and then pulled the remaining bunched-up plastic through from underneath. With the body completely on the sheet of plastic, he used it to pull the target over enough to allow the elevator doors to close automatically; the doors remained open due to the partial obstruction caused by the target’s body.

  After the elevator departed from the 13th floor, he took a deep breath. He knew it had begun: the clock began ticking. Soon, the elevator would open on another floor and someone would see the mess he caused. Someone would probably scream. If it opened on the lobby, the fat security guard he distracted earlier that morning—with a fucking rock of all things—would have to get off his stupid fat ass. He’d have to run over to the source of the scream and see what the fuck was going on. The thought made him smirk.

  He pulled one short end of the plastic, the side where the target’s feet rested, and positioned the target’s body so he could slide through the door to the lab. He took a deep breath and, as quickly as he could, used the plastic sheeting under the target’s body to drag him through the door into the 13th floor, all the way to the target’s lab setup. When he reached the lab, he let go of the plastic and the target’s feet hit the ground with a thud. He took a minute to catch his breath.

  The lab wasn’t really at all what he expected. That did create a bit of a problem since, going off all the information in the dossier, he came unprepared for disposal of the body. The problem wasn’t a complete game ruiner, merely a mildly frustrating inconvenience. A game changer. He could figure something out; he dealt with worse. That was, until he heard a groan.

  “Oh you gotta be shitting me,” he said out loud as he circled the body. He stopped when he reached the target’s head.

  He looked pretty damn dead. Maybe it was one of those post-mortem, creepy ass sounds some bodies made. Careful to avoid any of the mess, he knelt and put his fingers on the doctor’s neck. He detected a goddamn motherfucking pulse.

  “Damnit!” he barked into the empty floor. As he suspected earlier, the word seemed to echo for an eternity.

  He mulled over his options. Suddenly there were two clocks working against him: one for getting his ass out of the building as quickly as he could and one for figuring out what the fuck to do with the not-so-dead-yet target. Why couldn’t some people just die like they were supposed to?

  There was nothing he could make use of in the lab to assist with disposal of the body. It’s not like he expected to come up there and find a huge vat of acid to dissolve it in, or a giant wood-chipper he could use to obliterate it into tiny pieces. Hell, all he needed was a way to dismember and store or wrap the parts so he could deal with them later. That was the least he expected. It was a medical lab for christssakes, and he was pretty damn inventive.

  It would’ve been fucking awesome if the lab just so happened to present a convenient way to dispose of the body on the spot. However, he didn’t bank on that and would’ve simply settled for being able to pack the body up, so he could deal with it at a later time. Like a time when there weren’t swarms of personnel trying to figure out from where and whom that mess in the elevator had come.

  Not even a plastic tub. People would be amazed by what some people could do with a damn plastic tub, especially in his situation. Not only would it provide a place to store the body but toss in the plastic sheeting to wrap the pieces up, and he could store it and contain the stench of decay effectively enough. A plastic tub and something to cut with—that didn’t seem like asking for too much. He was willing to deal with the mess. He did it plenty of times before.

  He couldn’t simply wrap the body up in the plastic and leave it. When he came back, he’d still have to deal with the body, which meant unwrapping it. Or at the very least, dismembering it while it was wrapped up. Since he’d have to wait for rigor mortis to dissipate, the decay and stench would be unbearable, and there was no way he was going to deal with that. Nope.

  No fucking way.

  That was when the “barely a blip on the radar” target groaned a second time, which led to the idea that surprised himself.

  He flashed back to a story he heard in college about some railroad worker way back in like the 1800s or some shit who ended up getting a metal rod shot into his head during an explosion. Damnit, he couldn’t remember that dude’s name. All he remembered was that the dude survived, although his personality changed. However, what mattered to him was the dude survived. He took another look around the lab, that time from a different perspective, and the temporary albeit surprising solution presented itself.

  Approximately two and a half hours later, he left the lab and pressed the button for the only operating elevator.

  The doctor was still lying on the floor in the lab, still on the sheet of plastic. He had enough training to make use of the life-support equipment already in the lab and he positioned the machines next to the doctor. Based on what he remembered from the story about the dude who survived the metal rod in his head, he assumed something about having the rod stuck in his head somehow helped save him. Maybe it sealed off the arteries or whatever and stopped the bleeding.

  Who knows?

  He figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so he removed a metal pole from one of the examining tables and shoved it through the wound in the doctor’s head. He left some sticking out from both ends. He cleaned up the wound some. He only cleaned as much as he felt like cleaning, which wasn’t very much. He wrapped gauze around some of the target’s head and covered as much as he felt like covering, which also wasn’t very much. What the fuck did he care, since there was a pole sticking throu
gh the bastard’s head.

  It didn’t necessarily matter how long the target lasted like that; he merely hoped he lasted long enough to avoid being forced to cut up a horribly decaying corpse within the next few days. If the target only lived through the night, that was better than nothing. On the elevator ride down, he tried as hard as he could to remember the name of that damn dude from the railroad.

  It was driving him crazy and he laughed at himself. He got out of the elevator, walked straight through the main entrance of the hospital, and headed to his car. When he got in his car, he took his cellphone out of the glove compartment and, still unable to remember the dude’s name, opened the internet and searched the term “railroad head injury.”

  “Phineas Gage!” he shouted and smacked the steering wheel. He laughed at himself for thinking he’d ever be able to pull that name out of his ass. He clicked on the first result and started reading. He discovered that he was dead wrong; the rod didn’t remain lodged in Phineas Gage’s head. In fact, it shot straight through the man’s head and, according to the article, landed thirty yards away.

  He punched the steering wheel.

  “Shit!” he grumbled as he looked out the windshield and up toward the top four floors of the hospital, which was all he could see from where he was parked.

  Oh well, he figured, nice try anyway.

  It took him a while to realize and accept the fact that he actually was a Veilgrant. He always felt different from them, removed somehow. He pictured them as some crazy, lunatic fringe. As though they were against Veil because they were an odd mixture of stupid and arrogant. Not unlike how, back in the PreVeil days, there used to be nutbag separatists and cults. Those kinds of people. He never identified with them and, the more ostracized he was, the more he despised them.

  He eventually despised Veilgrants more than the rest of society despised them. He even shopped around to get a cosmetic port installed, but no one would do it. A normal doctor wouldn’t do it because they detested Veilgrancy, so why help someone hide being a Veilgrant? If he were able to find one, a Veilgrant doctor wouldn’t have done it because they were proud of being a Veilgrant and detested Veilers, so why help someone pose as one?

  He wasn’t sure why or how but one day it dawned on him: he was a Veilgrant. It didn’t matter why he refused to port. It made no difference why he refused to use Veil and network-in like everybody else. What mattered was that he did refuse. So what if he had an excuse for refusing? So did every other Veilgrant out there. That was the whole point. Besides, one of the main presumptions about Veilgrants was that they didn’t port because they were afraid of what others would find inside them.

  Fact was, that was precisely the thing that kept him from porting. They were right. No matter what his reason or what he’d done, he didn’t want to port because he didn’t want people to find out. He didn’t want people to find out who he was and what he’d done.

  In that way, Veil changed everything. There was no hiding anymore. There was no getting away with anything. There was no lying about who you were or what you’d done, even if you were lying to yourself. As important as it was, before Veil, to be able to live with who you were and what you’d done, it became just as important, after Veil, that everyone else was able to live with who you were and what you’d done. He’d done a lot of things in his life, most of which he could possibly, eventually be forgiven. But, not that one thing. Never would he be forgiven for that one thing.

  He had to face it: he was a Veilgrant, and he was always going to be one.

  He already dreaded the stench.

  In the hopes that it would at least make his job a tad bit more bearable, he waited two days, which was approximately how long it would take for rigor mortis to finish dissipating. Dealing with the stench was one thing; dealing with the stench while trying to dismember a body in rigor mortis was something entirely different. So he waited. Considering he left the target lying there with a pole sticking out of his head, he was positive the target didn’t last an hour. All he needed to do was get up there, get the job done and get out.

  He was all smiles as he pushed the cart over to the security desk. “Hey! What’s up boss?”

  “You know, you know.”

  “Yeah. Hey, I’ve got twelve larges for ummm,” he pretended to check his clipboard, “the conference room on the 15th floor, looks like room 1523?” He knew it was room 1523 because he reserved the room for a “conference” for the next three days. In case he needed more time. And that way, when security checked, as security was doing just then, there were no worries.

  “Looks like it,” the guard behind the desk replied. He was too rotund and lazy to get up out of his chair, so he pointed over his shoulder with his right thumb, “Over there and straight ahead to the elevators.”

  “Thanks boss, thanks,” he continued to smile. He pretended to glance over his shoulder before looking back at the guard. “And here man,” he whispered as he reached under the thermal padding that covered the entire cart. He pulled out the only pizza down there. “Take this one, I’ll tell ‘em they only sent eleven,” he winked.

  The guard perked right up when the pizza was placed on the counter in front of him.

  “Damn bro, I appreciate that. Ah, man that I do. Hungry as hell.”

  “No problem boss,” he smiled. “I know how it is.” He pretended to glance around again. “Just don’t get caught with it, ya know?” He laughed, backed away with his cart, and turned toward the elevators.

  “Thanks man for real,” the guard shouted after him.

  He headed for the elevator and could see from the corner of his eye that the guard was leaving his station. Dude was probably going to the employee lounge, so he could hide and eat the pizza. He shook his head with pity for the security guard. It was identical to the pity he felt three mornings prior, after he distracted the same guard by tossing a damn rock at one of the windows.

  He knew the guard would either forget all about the pizza dude or assume the pizza dude left when he was back in the lounge stuffing his fat fucking face. By the time he finished up on the 13th floor, the guards would’ve probably changed shifts, so he could traipse right out of the building while he pushed the cart filled with dead, dismembered doctor parts. If he couldn’t get all the doctor parts to fit inside the cart on the first try, he could come back the next day and do it all again. The fat ass guard would simply be happy to get another free pizza.

  An additional advantage of the cart was that it took up so much room it ensured he got the elevator to himself. He turned the cart around and pulled it into the elevator. After the doors closed, he shimmied his way around the cart and began the process to access the 13th floor. He whistled to himself and tapped his foot. The elevator stopped; the doors opened and he started to push the cart out of the elevator. Then he stopped.

  He stood inside the elevator. The cart’s handle was even with the elevator doors. He was faced by a soldier, who was dressed in all black and holding an M16 across his chest. The soldier was positioned directly in front of the lab door.

  “Stop,” the soldier directed him.

  “I’m already stopped.”

  “Well … don’t come any further.”

  “I need to get in there.”

  “No one is allowed inside. Those are the orders.” The soldier then looked straight ahead.

  “From Coffman?”

  The General’s name broke the soldier’s demeanor for a brief moment and his eyes went from fixed straight ahead, to eye-contact and then back to fixed straight ahead. He didn’t respond.

  “Look, I need to get in there.”

  “I’m afraid that can’t happen.”

  “Then contact General Coffman, but I’m telling you, one way or the other, I’m getting in there. I have work to finish.”

  No response.

  He moved to reach into his pocket and get the lab keys, but the solider detected his movement and immediately pointed the M16 at him. He stopped and raised his other han
d, palm facing the soldier.

  “Easy there big fella, I’m only getting the keys. Just getting the keys.” He took the keys out of his pocket and said, “Here.”—he tossed them at the solider, who caught them by reflex—“Now, I want you to open that door and look inside. When you do, if you look to the left, you’re going to see a body on the ground all the way by the far wall. I’m here to remove that body, which I was unable to do the other day. That man … that body in there is why General Coffman sent me here. It’s why he sent you here. And I need to get it taken care of now. If you would like to deal with the body yourself, by all means, please do. Otherwise let me through and let me do my job. Radio Coffman if you need to. Let him yell at you. Let him also wonder if he needs to have me eliminate you like I did the guy in there … simply because you saw all this.”

  The soldier seemed to contemplate for a moment while still pointing the M16 at the man behind the cart. He eventually twisted the upper half of his body toward the door. He inserted the two keys and pushed the door open. In the distance, on the left-hand side, he could see a body on the ground, hooked up to machines.

  “See?”

  The soldier faced forward and reported, “That man is still alive.”

  “What do you mean he’s still alive?”

  The soldier peered over his shoulder and observed the scene again. Even from that distance, he could see the bag on the ventilator rising up and down. More importantly however, although he couldn’t hear the beeps of the machine, he could see the movement on the heart monitor positioned next to the ventilator.